May 21, 2004
By NICK HORNBY
LONDON
It's just before Christmas last year, and the Philadelphia rock 'n' roll band Marah is halfway through a typicallyferocious, chaotic and inspirational set when the doors tothe right of the stage burst open and a young man staggers in, carrying most of a drum kit. My friends and I have thebest seats in the house, a couple of feet away from Marah'sfrontmen, Serge and Dave Bielanko, but when the drummer arrives we have to move our table back to make room forhim. He's not Marah's drummer (the band is temporarilywithout) but he's a drummer, and he owns most of a drum kit, and his appearance allows the band to make an evenmore glorious and urgent racket than they had managedhitherto. The show ends triumphantly, as Marah shows tend to do, with Serge lying on the floor amid the feet of his public, wailing away on his harmonica.
This gig happens to be taking place in a pub called the Fiddler's Elbow, in Kentish Town, north London, butdoubtless scenes like it are being played out throughoutthe world: a bar band, a pickup drummer from an earlier gig, probably even the table-shifting. It's just that threeor four months earlier, Bruce Springsteen, a fan of theband, invited the Bielanko brothers to share the stage withhim at Giants Stadium for an encore, and Marah will shortly release what would, in a world with ears, be one of 2004'smost-loved straight-ahead rock albums, "20,000 StreetsUnder the Sky." These guys shouldn't be playing in the Fiddler's Elbow with a pickup drummer. And they shouldn'tbe passing a hat around at the end of the gig, surely? Howmany people have passed around the hat in the same year that they appeared at Giants Stadium?
Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Jon Landau published his influential, exciting, career-changing, andsubsequently much derided and parodied article about BruceSpringsteen in The Real Paper, an alternative weekly - the article that included the line "I saw rock 'n' roll futureand its name is Bruce Springsteen." I had never read therest of it until recently, and it remains a lovely piece of writing. It begins, heartbreakingly: "It's four in themorning and raining. I'm 27 today, feeling old, listeningto my records and remembering that things were different a decade ago." I'm only guessing here, but I can imagine are a number of you reading this who can rememberwhat it was like to feel old at 27, and how it bears no resemblance to feeling old at 37, or 47. And you probablymiss records almost as much as you miss being 27.
It's hard not to think about one's age and how it relates to rock
music. I just turned 47, and with each passing yearit becomes harder
not to wonder whether I should belistening to something that is still
thought of as more age appropriate - jazz, folk, classical, opera,
funeralmarches, the usual suspects. You've heard the arguments amillion
times: most rock music is made by the young, for the young, about being
young, and if you're not young andyou still listen to it, then you
should be ashamed ofyourself. And finally I've worked out my response
to all that: I mostly agree with the description, even though it's
crude, and makes no effort to address the recent, mainly
excellent work of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant, Mr.
Springsteen et al. The conclusion, however, makes no sense to me any more.
Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater
abundance among the young, but we all need access to it.
(And not all young people are lucky enough to be young.
Think of those people at your college who wanted to be
politicians or corporate lawyers, for example.) I'm not
talking about the accouterments of youth: the unlined
faces, the washboard stomachs, the hair. The young are
welcome to all that - what would we do with it anyway? I'm
talking about the energy, the wistful yearning, the
inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of
invincibility, the hope that stings like chlorine. When I
was younger, rock music articulated these feelings, and now
that I'm older it stimulates them, but either way, rock 'n'
roll was and remains necessary because: who doesn't need
exhilaration and a sense of invincibility, even if it's
only now and again?
When I say that I have found these feelings harder and
hards harder and
harder to detect these last few years, I understand that I
run the risk of being seen as yet another nostalgic old
codger complaining about the state of contemporary music.
And though it's true that I'm an old codger, and that I'm
complaining about the state of contemporary music, I hope
that I can wriggle out of the hole I'm digging for myself
by moaning that, to me, contemporary rock music no longer
sounds young - or at least, not young in that kind of
joyous, uninhibited way. In some ways, it became way too
grown-up and full of itself. You can find plenty that's
angry, or weird, or perverse, or melancholy and
world-weary; but that loud, sometimes dumb celebration of
being alive has got lost somewhere along the way. Of course
we want to hear songs about Iraq, and child prostitution,
and heroin addiction. And if bands see the need to use
electric drills instead of guitars in order to give vent to
their rage, well, bring it on. But is there any chance we
could have the Righteous Brothers' "Little Latin Lupe Lu" -
or, better still, a modern-day equivalent - for an encore?
In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of
"David Copperfield," the novelist David Gates talks about
literature hitting "that high-low fork in the road, leading
on the one hand toward `Ulysses' and on the other toward
`Gone With The Wind,' " and maybe rock music has
experienced its own version. You can either chase the
Britney dollar, or choose the high-minded cult-rock route
that leads to great reviews and commercial oblivion. I buy
that arty stuff all the time, and a lot of it is great. But
part of the point of it is that its creators don't want to
engage with the mainstream, or no longer think that it's
possible to do so, and as a consequence cult status is
preordained rather than accidental. In this sense, the
squeaks and bleeps scattered all over the lovely songs on
the last Wilco album sound less like experimentation, and
more like a despairing audio suicide note.
Maybe this split is inevitable in any medium where there is
real money to be made: it has certainly happened in film,
for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture,
once upon a time. It takes big business a couple of decades
to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that
has happened, "that high-low fork in the road" is
unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly
daunting. It now requires more bravery than one would ever
have thought necessary to try and march straight on, to
choose neither the high road nor the low. Who has the nerve
to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off? In other
words, who wants to make art that is committed and
authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include,
rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of seeming
not only sincere and uncool - a stranger to all notions of
postmodernism - but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as
well.
Marah may well be headed for commercial oblivion anyway,
of course. "20,000 Streets Under the Sky" is their fourth
album, and they're by no means famous yet, as the passing
of the hat in the Fiddler's Elbow indicates. But what I
love about them is that I can hear everything I ever loved
about rock music in their recordings and in their live
shows. Indeed, in the shows you can often hear their love
for the rock canon uninflected - they play covers of the
Replacements' "Can't Hardly Wait," or the Jam's "In the
City," and they usually end with a riffed-up version of the
O'Jays' "Love Train." They play an original called "The
Catfisherman" with a great big Bo Diddley beat, and they
quote the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the Who's
"Magic Bus." And they do this not because they're a bar
band and people expect cover versions, but because they are
unafraid of showing where their music comes from, and
unafraid of the comparisons that will ensue - just as Bruce
Springsteen (who really did play "Little Latin Lupe Lu" for
an encore, sometimes) was unafraid.
It was this kind of celebration that Jon Landau had in mind
when he said in his review that "I saw my rock 'n' roll
past flash before my eyes." For Mr. Landau, the overbearing
self-importance of rock music of the late 60's and early
70's had left him feeling jaded; for me, it's the
overbearing self-consciousness of the 90's. The Darkness
know that we might laugh at them, so they laugh at
themselves first; the White Stripes may be a blues band,
but their need to exude cool is every bit as strong as
their desire to emit heat, and the calculations have been
made accordingly: there's as much artfulness as there is
art.
In truth, I don't care whether the music sounds new or old:
I just want it to have ambition and exuberance, a lack of
self-consciousness, a recognition of the redemptive power
of noise, an acknowledgment that emotional intelligence is
sometimes best articulated through a great chord change,
rather than a furrowed brow. Outkast's brilliant "Hey Ya!,"
a song that for a few brief months last year united races
and critics and teenagers and nostalgic geezers, had all
that and more; you could hear Prince in there, and the
Beatles, and yet the song belonged absolutely in and to the
here and now, or at least the there and then of 2003.
Both "Hey Ya!" and Marah's new album are roots records, not
in the sense that they were made by men with beards who
play the fiddle and sing with a finger in an ear, but in
the sense that they have recognizable influences -
influences that are not only embedded in pop history, but
that have been properly digested. In the suffocatingly
airless contemporary pop-culture climate, you can usually
trace influences back only as far as Radiohead, or Boyz II
Men, or the Farrelly Brothers, and regurgitation rather
than digestion would be the more accurate gastric metaphor.
The pop music critic of The Guardian recently reviewed a
British band that reminded him - pleasantly, I should add -
of "the hammering drum machine and guitar of controversial
80's trio Big Black and the murky noise of early Throbbing
Gristle." I have no doubt whatsoever that the band he was
writing about (a band with a name too confrontational and
cutting-edge to be repeated here) will prove to be one of
the most significant cultural forces of the decade, nor
that it will produce music that forces us to confront the
evil and horror that resides within us all.
However, there is still a part of me that persists in
thinking that rock music, and indeed all art, has an
occasional role to play in the increasingly tricky art of
making us glad we're alive. I'm not sure that Throbbing
Gristle and its descendants will ever pull that off, but
the members of Marah do, often. I hope they won't be
passing around the hat by the end of this year, but if they
are, please give generously.
Nick Hornby is the author, most recently, of "Songbook."
